Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Two Interesting Articles

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I read a couple of interesting articles this morning I wanted to share.

The first is called Hedge Fund Legend Michael Steinhardt Says Treasuries Are Foolish.

Steinhardt goes on to say that he thinks the current market rally will
not last and that we are not out of the woods yet. He says, "The
economy is still a scary place. My net feeling is that this rally
doesn't have all that much more to go and the dangers out there remain
consequential." Clearly he sees this as a bear market rally and thinks
we have large fundamental problems still unsolved.

The second is an interesting article on how the consumer confidence indicator is actually often running the opposite direction of where the market is about to run. Bears, take this to heart when considering the recent surge in confidence.

In other words, focusing on consumer confidence tells us more about how
the stock market has performed in recent weeks than it does about the
future. But insofar as consumer confidence tells us anything about the
future, it's that big rises and/or high readings are more negative than
positive for the stock market.

Blocked and White-Listed Email

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Good Morning,

First, a few people have written wondering if I've blocked them from Disqus. Unless your name is Cetin the Cretin, no, I haven't blocked you. It's something I do virtually never. So I'm afraid it must be a Disqus problem. Please write to them and see what's going on, since I value your discussion! I daresay the Comments section is more important than any of the stuff I manage to write.

Second, I emailed a handful of you last night (selected individuals who filled out my survey-that-shall-not-be-named). One person asked if it was really me that was writing, and not some Nigerian prince. Yep, it was me.

Anyway, let's hope today goes better than yesterday. A nice lift in commodities would do the trick for me, personally!

Looking at my top six holdings (by dollar amount), it's a pretty good start to the day; as you can see, I've gone long energy, for the most part. One puzzler is UNG (natural gas), which is the one big position I've got which has started the day weak.

One really does have to wonder, "what's with natural gas?" It's been terribly weak. But I bought it just yesterday, since I think it may soon follow its stronger breathren.

Ratio Charts Tomorrow!

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I'm not much in the mood for talking about the Goldman Sachs Playground stock market, so I'll just toss off my final post of the day by telling you about a cool new ProphetCharts feature coming for Toolbox users tomorrow.

It's ratio charts. You will be able to, in parentheses, divide any symbol by another symbol and graph it. Here are a couple of examples:

Just to be clear, this will be deployed tomorrow afternoon for users of the Investor Toolbox. Those using ProphetCharts in ThinkOrSwim and in Prophet.net will get this feature within the next couple of weeks.

See you Wednesday. Let's hope for a better day.

Upside Risk

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The fact that the /ES didn't break 875 is bad news for the bears. Period.

The above is a pretty damned bullish chart, as much as I hate to say it. The "upside risk" seems pretty substantial to me, as I look through my general index charts.

This market is going to keep climbing higher until some powerful exogenous reason appears to sell it down hard (a general earnings collapse, a surprise attack, or God-knows-what-else). Today's very strong volume is pretty bad news for the bears too, I would say. For my own positions, I have beat a hasty retreat on the short side and have a small long position on the /ES to try to balance things out. I am in a very defensive stance right now.